NEWARK, Del., June 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Quest Pharmaceutical Services (QPS), a full-service, GLP-compliant, contract research organization, is announcing the launch of its new Molecular Biology Service during two major meetings this week - the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists' National Biotechnology Conference in Boston (Booth #521) and the annual meeting of the Drug Information Association in Philadelphia (Booth #814).

"This new service will provide our pharmaceutical and biotech customers with top quality data to help assess drug toxicity and drug response necessary for patient stratification, treatment decision making, and therapy evaluation in drug development," says Dr. Ben Chien, President and CEO of the privately held, Delaware-based firm.

The new QPS department, located at its Newark facility, has assembled best-in-class instrumentations, platforms, and processes required to conduct studies supporting client drug discovery and development strategies. It offers a wide variety of services for integration of pharmacogenomics (PGx) into drug development, including automated RNA and DNA isolation, genotyping and genetic mutation analysis, gene expression profiling analysis, quantitative determination of CpG methylation, viral load determination, and custom assays.

"Our mission is to provide PGx technologies to help drug sponsors develop therapeutics with better efficacy and safety profiles," says Dr. Ling Sing Chen, Executive Director of Molecular Biology at QPS. "This in turn will shorten drug development timelines and reduce development costs."